Improving Your Digital Photo Skills

In this day and age of digital cameras, you’ve probably heard or thought that all you have to do is push the button and great pictures magically appear.Hold on, don’t go so fast.The honest truth is, you may have a great digital camera, but if you are clueless in what to do, you will take ugly shots.

Well, I’d love to share with you some great advice in photography to help improve your skills.  These tips are coming from years of experience as a San Diego wedding photographer.These tips are all about the lighting and they will some of biggest reasons for you success in taking photographs.

First great tip in regards to lighting.Now if the shots you are taking are outdoors during the day, some of the best lighting possible will be the natural sunlight.  Now you are probably thinking, “that’s easy, when you are a San Diego photographer since it is always shiny there”, when in actuality really bright sunlight can cast harsh shadows.  Or it can wash out the details in faces if the sun is overhead.

Overall, you are going to want to take most of the shots with the sun behind you.This stops any harsh shadows in your photo caused by the sun.  But there will be some instances when you want to try different angles when you are trying to get some shadows into the shots.

Now that we have addressed the shots during the day, what about those night shots? 

The trick to taking night shots is to turn off your flash.Of course if it is absolutely dark with no light you wil need it, but for times when there is some lighting, use the lighting around you, but make sure the shutter speeds are slow enough to let light in.Another thing, make sure you keep a steady hand when you take your shot or you can blur the photos.Doing these tricks should make a significantly dramatic difference when you take night shots. 

The third and final tip with using lighting to capture great photos is the golden hour.There is this time that photographers like to call the golden hour or magic hour, and that is sunrise and sunset.

It is during this time of day when you will capture great shots that capture more warmer colors.  You will be able to capture that golden lighting you won’t catch any other time of day.

There you have it.  Probably the biggest key in taking greatshots is to make sure you take advantage of the natural lighting.  Knowing what techniques to use for different parts of the day, or just scheduling a photo shoots to capture those times of day will help you become an excellent photographer.